Month: October 2018

If you follow Power BI on Twitter, you may have noticed the #BIPowerHour tag over the last few weeks. For those who have been part of the Microsoft data community for a while, you probably know what this is all about, but I’ve seen quite a few people asking “What is the BI Power Hour?” This post is for them.

The BI Power Hour is a conference session that shows Microsoft data and business intelligence tools, products, and services being used for purposes other than that for which they were built. I’ve heard people describe it as “stupid BI tricks”[1], and as smart as some of the tricks have been, I can’t argue with that description. The session has been part of multiple conferences for over a decade, with some of the best technical presenters around[2] showing off humorous and thought-provoking[3] demos.

Some of my personal favorite BI Power Hour demos over the years include:

Building an online dating app using SQL Server Integration Services

Using SQL Server Integration Services, Master Data Services, and Data Quality services to respond to all of the social opportunities that came from the previous year’s dating app

Data mining the Titanic passenger list using the data mining add-in for Excel

Data mining the Oracle price list using the data mining add-in for Excel[4]

Building a multiplayer version of Battleship using SQL Server Reporting Services

Predicting the end of the world with Power BI[5]

Using Power BI and a database of heavy metal bands to demonstrate how Power BI got its name

The list goes on and on – there are too many highlights to call out here. Each year has been different, but each year has also been delightful.

This year we’re back, and we have some “pro tips” for those of you who are attending the PASS Summit next week in Seattle.

Show up early. The last time we had a BI Power Hour at PASS in Seattle, the room was 100% full, with scores of people turned away.

Sit near the front, even if you don’t sit in the front row. We’ll be throwing swag, and much of it is not aerodynamic, so sitting all the way in the back reduces the odds of your getting a t-shirt or other goodies.

Sit next to someone who is a different size than you. This one may sound odd, but if the person next to you catches a t-shirt that doesn’t fit, your odds just increased. Am I right?

Don’t expect to learn anything useful. We’ll mention this one again during the session intro, but it’s important to know in advance that we have explicitly defined real-world skills as Out Of Scope for this session. the BI Power Hour is all about having fun at the end of a long week – if you want to learn something, pick a different session.

Use the #BIPowerHour hashtag everywhere you can!! Because no real-world skills are taught, and no useful topics are covered, some people[6] seem to think that the session isn’t a priority. If you disagree, please share and tweet before, during, and after the session, to let the powers that be understand your opinion.

I’ll wrap up by casually reminding you that the BI Power Hour put “Power” and “BI” together many years before they ever appeared in an official, marketing-blessed name. I’m not saying that this is the session where the future gets determined, but…

I try to avoid using Excel as a data source when I can. Although Excel has many benefits[1], its limitations[2] make it less than ideal for enterprise BI solutions. Despite this, it feels like I end up needing to analyze data in Excel at least once a month. And every time I’m connecting from Power Query to an Excel workbook located in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business, I find myself exclaiming “it shouldn’t be this hard!”[3]

What’s the problem? It’s not working with the data – Power Query makes this as painless as you’d expect. The problem is referencing the XSLX file. What path do I use?

In Excel and in SharePoint, there is a “copy link” option, which will copy a link to the workbook so you can share it with others.

it always feels like this should work, that I should be able to paste this URL into the Get Data experience in Power Query, and if it’s been more than a few months since the last time I tried, I expect it to work. But it never does.

This works:

In the Excel ribbon, click on the File tab, and on the Info screen that appears click on the label under the file name. There’s no visual indicator that this label is a menu button until you hover over it, but when you click on it, a menu appears with a “Copy path to clipboard” option.

With this starting point, all you need to do is remove the ?web=1 query string parameter at the end of the URL, and you have the path to the workbook that Power Query needs.

Choose “Web” as the data source in the Get Data menu, and paste this URL into the Dialog:

Power Query is smart enough to understand that this URL is pointing to an Excel workbook, so from this point on, you’ll get an experience where you can select tables and worksheets, and can start manipulating and analyzing your Excel data.

Life is good.

Full disclosure: Were it not for Power Query program manager Miguel Llopis, I never would have found this. During one of our dataflows sessions at Microsoft Ignite, Miguel spent a few minutes walking through the these steps at the beginning of a demo. My initial reaction was along the lines of “Why are you showing this? This isn’t a dataflows topic!” but when I realized what he was showing it quickly changed to “Holy crap – I didn’t know you could do that!”

In any event, I’m working with data in Excel again today, and spent a few minutes trying to find this technique documented anywhere. When I couldn’t find any, this post was born… but all credit should go to Miguel.

[1] None of which will I list here. It’s not that kind of blog.

[2] Neither will the limitations be enumerated. Feel free to take my word for it, or go build a data warehouse or two that extract data from Excel, and then come back and let me know what you think.

[3] To be fair, this may be another of those “get off my lawn” moments. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

One of the things I love the most about software development is that it lets me imagine something, create the thing I imagined, and share the thing I created.

For me, baking hits the same creative “sweet spot” that software development hits. And, of course baking can also be literally sweet as well. But beyond the joy of eating something delicious and homemade, making something with your own two hands can be deeply satisfying and therapeutic, in a way that making something at the keyboard is not.

Kind of like how fencing is sometimes described as “physical chess,” baking is like physical software development.[1] There are common components and frameworks. There are tools that are required, and tools which are optional, but which will will save you time and frustration. There are patterns that can be learned in one application, and applied to other, related applications. There are some rules you must follow, and some rules you can bend, and it takes study and experience to know the difference between the two. The parallels go on and on.

It doesn’t matter where you channel your creativity, but having a creative outlet where you can relax, learn, and express yourself.

In related news, if you’re going to be at the Power BI World Tour event today at the Microsoft Advanta offices in Bellevue, I baked cookies. Specifically, I baked caraway shortbread cookies inspired by the ones they serve at Dinner by Heston in London. Look for me at the evening reception event.

[1] Fencing is also sometimes known as “chess with pain” and “pain” is French for bread. Coincidence? I think not.

(If you’re only here for the technical content, please feel free to skip this post – but I hope you’ll read anyway.)

Imagine you’re building a BI solution, and you encounter problem behavior. You’re not sure if it’s an actual bug, but it is keeping you from achieving your goals. You search online, but can’t find any knowledge base articles, blog posts, or documentation that help. When you try to talk to other developers, none of them wants to talk about it, none will admit to having the same problem, and it seems like they treat you differently after you asked, like they think less of you because you couldn’t solve this problem on your own. Over time you develop workarounds to build a solution that meets your requirements. Some of the workarounds are quite elaborate, which impacts the performance and maintainability of your solution, but because no one will talk about the underling problems, you don’t have any way to communicate the impact of the workarounds to other stakeholders. It feels like everything is harder than it needs to be.

That sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it? Now imagine if this was life in general, not just a BI project.

I’ve suffered from clinical anxiety and depression since I was in my early teens. Both the anxiety and the depression have come and gone over the years, but each has also grown worse as I’ve aged. And to make things worse, until I was well into my 40s I didn’t realize what was going on.

I thought it was just me. I thought that I was just having a harder time doing things that were easier for others. I felt lessened, and inadequate. I felt broken.

But that was only when the depression and anxiety were present. When they receded, it was hard to remember how hard everything had been.

If this sounds strange, think back to the last time you were seriously ill, or injured[1]. The injury or illness was an ever-present part of your life, making it difficult to do some things and impossible to do others. If your recovery took more than a few weeks, it may have been difficult to even remember a time when you hadn’t needed to structure your life around your disability. But once you’ve recovered, even though you can remember the time you were sick or hurt, how well can you actually remember what it was like, how it actually felt at the time? It’s hard, isn’t it?

I didn’t start figuring out what was going on until mental health started being part of public discourse – until people started talking about it. Sadly, this typically meant some celebrity had taken his own life, and for a few weeks the news would talk about how the veneer of happiness and success had masked his sadness all along. Sometimes there would be meaningful discussion, but usually the news coverage was about as informed and meaningful as news coverage of complex technical issues, with all that implies.

In addition to this increasing public dialog, there were four specific resources that were incredibly helpful to me, and which empowered me to look differently at my own mental health:

Actor Wil Wheaton’s epic blog post about depression: This raw and personal story had me in tears, because so much of it was my own story. The details are different, and it’s obvious that Wil’s struggles are more difficult than my own, but the themes and patterns were incredibly familiar.

“The Anxiety Chronicles” on The Lily: This is a series of short articles by different women, each with the tagline “this is how I experience anxiety.” Again, while the details are different, many of these stories have strong and stark parallels with my own anxiety.

The growing discussion about mental health in the tech field: I started noticing this trend this year, and I’m seeing more and more of it. When I spoke at the Craft Conference in Budapest there were a bunch of sessions including this one about depression and burnout from the amazing Gitte Klitgaard. And there is a wonderful community on Twitter including April Wensel and her “compassionate coding” efforts, and Microsoft’s Ann Johnson and Shona Chee. Although I call out these three leaders by name, it’s not just them that help. What helps the most is that there is a discussion, an open and public discussion, that lets people know that it is ok to struggle, that it’s ok to admit that you’re struggling, and that there are people who want to help.

Friends, especially younger friends: Most of the people in my martial arts community are much younger than I am, and it appears that the younger generation hasn’t picked up all the negative baggage that my generation did. Whether it is authors Joseph Brassey or Ed McDonald, coach and instructor Kaja Sadowski, or any of the awesome young people I train with, having people I know and respect who are openly discussing their trials and tribulations is incredibly valuable – because it shows me that I’m not alone in the challenges I face.

This is why I decided to write this post, and why I’m glad you took the time to actually read it. If even one person reading this post has felt as alone and lost as I have felt, and now realizes that it’s not just them, if this post can help even half as much as Wil Wheaton’s post helped me, that it was worth writing.

Please understand that this isn’t just about talking – I’ve taken concrete steps to improve my mental health. I exercise every day. I prioritize getting enough quality sleep every night. I eat well, and cook most of the food I eat. I quit drinking, and use a HappyLight during the winter months. I’m working to find a therapist to help me build better coping mechanisms for those times when life is overwhelming. I practice mindful self-care every day, building habits and routines when life is good so that I can keep them going when it is not.

But those steps only go so far in isolation. Knowing that there are other people out there going through what you’re going through is invaluable and empowering. Having a community, however loosely-knit, can make the bad times feel less lonely.

Don’t worry – I’ll keep posting about technical topics like Power BI dataflows, and metadata. But please realize that when things are dark and times are hard, those posts will be made possible in large part by the “elaborate workarounds” mentioned in the analogy at the beginning of this post. Like most[2] successful people who struggle with mental illness, I have over the years developed a set of coping mechanisms that let me keep going, keep creating and delivering, even when it is difficult to do so – and to make it appear like nothing is wrong. Please realize that there are people around you who are doing the same thing, and who may not be able or willing to talk about it – they’re struggling silently and trying to get by, fighting a battle that one one else can see.

So be kind. Practice being kind by default. It makes a bigger difference than you might think.

[1] I’m thinking back to the time in 2016 when I broke my right hand. I needed surgery to repair the break, and after surgery I was in a cast for two months, followed by months of physical therapy. Now, even though I still do physical therapy exercises every day, I can’t remember what it was like to have my mobility and function so limited for so long. It’s almost like it happened to someone else, because of the passage of time.

[2] I assume, but this assumption is based on personal anecdotes and observations, rather than on real data.

One of the exciting new preview capabilities in the October 2018 release of Power BI Desktop is support for data profiling in the Power Query editor. Having per-column data profile information available in the query editor is very useful to help understand the data you’re working with…

…but what about understanding data in a broader context?

The Power Query function language “M” contains a Table.Profile function that accepts a table as input and returns a table containing the data profile for the input table.[1] You can use this in Power BI Desktop, but the value of this, at least now that there is a data profiling UI, is limited in scope.

This is where dataflows can help.

Remember the Excel-like, automatically-updating capabilities of linked and computed dataflow entities?[2] The most common use case for linked entities is for data transformation, but with Table.Profile you can also use linked entities to collect, consolidate, and maintain data profile information for the data stored in dataflow entities.

And it’s surprisingly simple.

Start with a workspace[3] and a dataflow, and add linked entities to it for each of the entities you want to profile.

For each linked entity in the dataflow, perform the following steps:

Right-click on the entity in the query editor and select “Reference” from the context menu to create a computed entity

Rename the new computed entity to include the word “profile”

Right-click on the renamed entity and select “Advanced editor” from the context menu

In the advanced editor, add a new query step that uses the Table.Profile function

Like this:

The edited query is very simple, and because all of the edits made to one query will apply without modification to each of the other queries, once the first one is done it’s just a copy and paste for each new profile entity. You can make this easier by putting the comma at the beginning of the profile line, rather than at the end of the source line, but it will work either way.

let
Source = Site
,Profile = Table.Profile(Source) // note the placement of the comma
in
Profile

When you’re done, you’ll have a dataflow that contains data profiles for each linked entity, regardless of the workspace in which the linked entity originated.

One of the biggest challenges for data governance is having current and accurate metadata available for enterprise data assets. Data profiles are only one part of this, but they’re a significant part. Because of the nature of linked entities in Power BI, we can now have up-to-date column-level profiles for our data, and can have it without a major engineering effort, and without any complex orchestration or management.

Life is good.

[1] If I understand correctly, the new feature in Power BI Desktop uses this function.

[2] If you don’t, you should probably read this post before you continue.

[3] Remember: to use linked entities this needs to be a new “v2” workspace, and it needs to be backed by Power BI Premium dedicated capacity.

The older I get, the more consistently I encounter things that make me feel old. And it’s not just the usual things, like those damned kids on my lawn. It’s things like technology. And sometimes it’s things like new features in Power BI.

Let’s take, for example, the new “from web” experience that was introduced in Power BI Desktop over the summer, and which is generally available (out of preview) this month. This is a cool feature that at first glance looks pretty straightforward, but it caused me no end of problems.

When it became clear that I wasn’t going to be able to do what I needed with only the UI, I started looking into the Power Query functions being used in the query created by the UI. The code in my PBIX file didn’t make any sense to me, so I look in more places, like:

And still, I couldn’t quite figure out how to solve my problem. I was frustrated and annoyed , not just because I couldn’t do what I needed, but because I was convinced that there was some simple, easy thing that I was missing.

And I was right.

This brings me back to feeling old.

When I was your age[1], we only had one HTML tag, and it was <marquee> and we were glad to have it. We didn’t need any of those fancy stylesheets that kids these days have cascading all over the place, because we had H1 and H2 and that was more than enough for any page we could think of.

All pretense aside, I didn’t know that CSS selectors existed before I started trying to use the Html.Table function in Power Query, and that was a real problem. The inline help mentioned CSS selectors in the function description, but without more prior knowledge and context, this wasn’t helpful to me. At all. So I asked for help.

One of the developers on the Power BI team took the time to listen to what I was trying to accomplish, and gave me the code that I’d been so consistently failing to write on my own[2]. Once I had something simple that worked, I was able – with a little more research and some reformatting – to build the queries that I needed, but I don’t think I could have done it without that help.

So, working under the assumption that I’m not the only old guy out there who knows data pretty well, but hasn’t kept up to date on web technologies like CSS, I wanted to share the story and the code.

Here’s the pattern I was trying to implement. This is a relatively common pattern in my experience, although the details are different each time:

Extract a set of links and related data from a parent web page

For each of the links extracted from the parent, extract a set of data from the child web page, where each of the child pages has a consistent format

Use the data from the parent and the child pages to build a data set for reporting and analysis

I started off by using the UI, stepping through the new “From web” experience in Power BI Desktop. I knew that this wouldn’t give me everything I needed – you can’t get the URLs behind a link, you can only get the text – but I hoped it would give me a starting point.

It gave me this:

I’m sharing this query as an image and not as text because I want to highlight one of the challenges I faced: the formatting. Because the Html.Table function accepts a complex parameter, I needed to “pretty format” it before I could visually parse it and compare the specific syntax to the available help, and to the source of the web page I was trying to use as a data source.

Even then, I was still stuck. There were not enough points of reference between the HTML and the query for me to relate them and to start modifying the query script. After fighting with this for longer than I care to admit, I asked for help. In return, I got this query:

That was much better! With this code, formatted so it was clear how the various parts of the columnNameSelectorPairs parameter related to each other, I could finally make some progress on my own. In short order I had this query:

The second tool is the SelectorGadget Chrome extension, which lets you click on elements on the page, and see the CSS selector that would select them. This may not have been an absolute requirement, but it definitely saved me time and swearing.

Hopefully this has been useful. I may be the only old dog out there trying to learn new tricks, but then again, I may not be. Ether way, get off my lawn!

[1] Please go back and read that in your best “crotchety old man” voice. Thank you.

[2] Thanks again, Ehren!

[3] Or maybe build a demo for the BI Power Session at the PASS Summit next month. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

But did you know that you can help the Power BI team make the release notes better?

Take a look at the release notes.

Look more closely. Look down… all the way down. Look here:

At the bottom of every page in the Power BI release notes[1] you can find a widget to provide feedback on whether or not the page is helpful. If you click “no” you’ll be prompted to share your ideas on how the page could be improved:

Even if you’ve noticed this feedback mechanism before, you probably haven’t used it. I say this because the number of suggestions received by the Power BI team is very small when compared to the number of people using Power BI, or even if compared to the number of people reading the documentation.

This could mean one of two things:

The documentation is pretty much perfect, and it includes all of the information you were looking for. [2]

You decided that this widget was generic and not specific to Power BI, or that it was a black hole, where no one really looked at the feedback anyway.

Based on the number of questions I hear each week about the Power BI roadmap, I’m tempted to suggest that option #2 is more likely. Fortunately, I’m here to let you know that this is not the case.

Every time you provide feedback on a page in the Power BI documentation – whether it is simply clicking “yes” or “no,” or if you take the time to provide more in-depth feedback, someone from the Power BI team reads it, and uses that feedback to improve the documentation.

If you’re looking for more information about what’s coming in Power BI, this is the best way to let the Power BI team know. For example, if a page in the release notes says something general about an upcoming feature, and you’re trying to understand if this includes something specific[3], ask for this to be included in the page.

Please understand that if you’re asking general questions about upcoming capabilities that are not covered in the release notes, it generally means that the Power BI team isn’t ready to talk about it yet[4]. But if there is a topic already included in the release notes or other documentation and you would like it expanded or clarified, please do share your feedback. People are listening[5] – let them listen to you too.

[1] And every page in Microsoft’s online documentation, for that matter. Not just Power BI, and not just the release notes.

[2] Good job, Power BI team! Take the rest of the day off!

[3] Most of the questions I hear each week fall into this category.

[4] This is the reality of building software. The further out a feature is, the less certainty there can be about its details and timing. As a general rule, it’s better to say “we don’t know” or to not say anything than it is to say something with low confidences and then to not deliver as expected. We all know this, right?

[5] This blog post was inspired by a conversation I had last week. I was trying to figure out what I could do to help make the release notes better, because I was seeing a trend in questions that fall into the general scope of the release notes, but which could not be directly answered by the existing release notes content. Hearing that there was already a process in place to collect and act on feedback was a surprise to me, and the conversations I’ve had since then suggest that it may be a surprise to you as well. It could be that everyone but me already knew this, but I wanted to share this, just in case…